Public school ‘left behind’ proselytizing Christian book (May 15, 2013)

A complaint by the Freedom From Religion Foundation removed an evangelical Christian book from an elementary school in the Mead School District of Spokane, Wash.

A concerned parent alerted FFRF after her Prairie View Elementary student read a children’s version of a book in the “Left Behind” series. The “Left Behind” book series attempts to proselytize and frighten children into the Protestant faith. The series takes place after ‘the rapture’ when god has rescued all the good Christians and is in the process of smiting all the bad non-Christians. The book’s protagonists survive by becoming more Christian and getting closer to their god.

In a May 9 letter to a Mead School District official, FFRF Staff Attorney Andrew Seidel requested the book be removed from the teacher’s small classroom library. Children were expected to borrow books from the library during quiet reading times.

Seidel called the book anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-nonreligious. At one point in the book Jesus Christ rips open the bodies of “the enemies of God,” Seidel wrote.

Jared Hoadley, the Executive Director of Student Services for the District, responded to Seidel in a May 15 email that the teacher willingly removed the book in question from her library.